Electronic messaging has dramatically changed the manner in which people communicate with one another in the digital age. Electronic messaging systems, for example, permit users on different computers to communicate with one another by transmitting information such as text messages and the like between the different computers. Electronic messaging is often used to permit employees in a company to communicate with other employees connected to the company's internal network, regardless of whether they are in the same or another company facility. Also, due to the explosive growth of the Internet, electronic messaging has now become a relatively common way for anyone with a computer to communicate with other computer users all over the world.
In most electronic messaging systems, users are assigned user identifiers, or “user id's” that uniquely identify each user. Furthermore, each user is typically assigned one or more “mailboxes,” (also referred to as “post office boxes”) that have a unique address so that any user wishing to send an electronic message (often referred to as an “e-mail”) to another user can do so by addressing the electronic message to the mailbox assigned to that user.
Many electronic messaging systems furthermore keep electronic “address books,” which typically include contact information databases within which are stored records of the mailbox addresses for different users. Therefore, for example, a user wishing to send an electronic message to a user named John Smith, whose mailbox address is “smithj@xyz.com”, is then able to search through an address book to find an entry for “Smith, John”, rather than having to remember a relatively cryptic mailbox address that is assigned to that user.
Some address books also store additional information about users, such as telephone numbers, mailing addresses, job titles, and other information that is more or less unrelated to electronic messaging. Such an address book is often referred to as a “contact manager,” as a user is capable of using the address book to maintain a wide variety of information about many different people (referred to in this context as “contacts”). As the use of electronic messaging has become more widespread, many computer users send and receive more electronic messages to and from a larger number of other computer users.
Typically, a user of a prior art contact management software application is required to enter the contact information that they want to store in their address book. A variety of methods exist for entering this contact information. It may be entered manually using a keyboard device, imported from an existing file on their computer, or imported via a peripheral device such as a business card scanner. Unfortunately, often the user does not have a complete set of contact information, and accordingly some contact information fields remain unpopulated when a new contact is added to the address book.
Prior art methods of updating and maintaining contact information databases are known. For example, services such as Internet-Based “White Pages” and E-Mail Directory Services are used to synchronize contact information of locally maintained address books with current contact information stored on a central storage system. Such a service may be used to populate empty contact information fields at some time after a new contact has been added to a local address book. It is a disadvantage of this form of service that each party is required to be a member of the service and that members of the address book, which are not already subscribed, still have to manually inform the subscribed user of their contact information. Furthermore, it is a disadvantage that this form of service requires the contact information to be stored on a central storage system. Although security may be strictly enforced, there are still privacy and security concerns because all personal information is accessible from outside the server.
It would be highly advantageous to provide a method for populating contact information fields for newly added contacts within a contact database absent security concerns, privacy concerns and mandatory subscription to a service by each party within a given contact list.